


Conversations We'll Never See: Tegan and Sarah

by attack_giraffe



Series: Conversations We'll Never See [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Sarah Jane Adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 20:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5715442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attack_giraffe/pseuds/attack_giraffe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after each has left (or been left by) the Doctor, Tegan encounters Sarah Jane Smith...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations We'll Never See: Tegan and Sarah

 

Some people dream of a fantastic life beyond their mundane existence. They wish for someone to whisk them away from the humdrum grind and show them wonders few others are privileged to enjoy. They want to be special.

Well...it happened to me, and I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to forget all about it and pretend it never happened.

Of course, it’s not as easy as all that. First there’s just the visceral reactions. A certain shape of pipe that reminds me of the sides of a Cyberman’s head. A bloody salt shaker that makes me think of Daleks. Some kid with dark eyes and a Beatles haircut that makes me remember Adric.

Then there’s the deeper things. I know what few people even really suspect--that our normal, mundane world is almost continually under attack. That lots of strange things reported in the press, and lots more the press never even gets wind of, that most people just shrug off as conspiracy theory or random happenstance, are real. Most people who say things like that are shrugged off as crazy. So I don’t say anything.

Sometimes, I confuse the two. I catch something out of the corner of my eye that I think I’m going to be able to shrug off as just the mundane world triggering my post-TARDIS-stress-disorder, and I realize that I really did just see an alien slink off into an alleyway, or something similar that most people would convince themselves they’d never seen.

Once, on a layover in London between flights, I even saw a man--impossibly young-looking, long, lanky, almost tripping over his own legs, with a chin you could hang a Christmas ornament off and a bow-tie--being followed by a young ginger girl as they followed down the same alleyway.

I had never seen that face before, but I knew the man immediately. I knew the girl, too. I mean, I couldn’t have told you her name, but I knew her. I’d been her.

For a moment...just a moment...I thought about following them, or at least calling out to the man. Then I remembered all the reasons I quit that life. I went back to my hotel and drank myself stupid. Working the airplane the next day was painful, but at least it kept me distracted.

And that’s how I cope. I got back my flight attendant job, somehow, and I never (voluntarily) looked back. Always in motion, always dealing with new people and all their perfectly mundane little problems, it cuts down on the amount of time I have to think about, and drink about, the horrors that went with the wonders. Most of the time, it works.

Except for that one day…

###

When you’ve travelled to the far reaches of space in a huge space-time machine disguised as a police box, air travel is pretty boring.

Really, when you’ve traveled to the far reaches of space in a space-time machine disguised as a police box, almost everything else is boring.

Fifteen years ago, the most amazing, most infuriating person I’d ever known left me flat on a residential street in Aberdeen, disappeared, and never came back. Fortunately, he’d at least gotten the year right, and I was able to find a phone and call in a favour with UNIT to get a lift home to Croydon.

It took me three weeks to figure out what to do next. Three weeks mostly sitting at home waiting to hear that terrible, wonderful noise and see that absurdly broad smile beneath the mop of dark curly hair, to know that he was all right and that we were going to dash off to do more amazing things together.

At the end of three weeks I started finally getting angry with myself. What kind of feminist was I, anyway, sitting around moping over some man who dumped me. I mean, sure, maybe he was dead or something, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt downright jilted. It was silly, but I couldn’t escape it. There was nothing “like that” between us...and yet...

But moping, even moping over a Time Lord, doesn’t pay the rent. Slowly, slowly, I started getting back to my old routines. I’d never entirely abandoned them, after all. They’d just occasionally been interrupted by investigating mysteries I could never write about!

There was really no shortage of work. I’d first met the Doctor, and UNIT, because I had a nose for following up on things other people prefer to shrug off as impossible nonsense, like vanishing scientists or giant robots. Even when I wasn’t trying, my paths crossed with UNIT all the time.

Of course, I’d also get distracted, sometimes. I could never look at a spider, for example, without remembering Metebilis III, and potatoes always left me laughing in retrospect at how much Sontarans look like them.

Every now and then, it would feel like something I was investigating might lead to an actual encounter, a chance to confront him and ask him why he left me. I’m actually certain our paths crossed at least twice, although his face was different. Each time, I stopped myself, despite desperately wanting to at least call out to him. I knew there were at least five of him, but I didn’t ever find out what order they all went in, or if there were others before. It occurred to me that I could cause a real problem if I grabbed the attention of one who hadn’t actually met me yet!

It was an excuse, really. If there were others after the ones I’d traveled with, I wasn’t sure I wanted that confirmed. That would just mean he really had dumped me, and never come back.

Mostly, though, I just got on with investigating and writing. It kept me focused and grounded. I’d gotten into it because I felt it was necessary work, and nothing had changed that. It cut down on the amount of time I spent dwelling on everything I was missing.

Except for that one day…

###

I was working a flight to New York from London. After all this time, even on a long flight, they’re all just faces to me. I get some sense of familiarity with the few who choose to be chatty as we’re working the aisles, and some people--usually the ones who either genuinely need, or think they deserve, special treatment--naturally stand out, but most of them I forget as soon as I look away. I don’t have a lot of friends--being a paranoid mouth on legs does not really make one “friend” material--so I don’t really expect to see anyone I know.

There she was. Emergency exit row, window seat, looking out the window and tuning out the world around her, like so many passengers do. I knew her in an instant.

I had no idea what to do. I was pushing the trolley up the row to begin the first beverage and snack service, back to front. She didn’t see me go past. I didn’t call attention to myself. It was all I could do not to run, even knowing there was nowhere to run to.

When I got to her row to actually offer them drinks and snacks, she was asleep, head leaning against the wall.

I was not so lucky the second time around, when we started handing out lunch.

###

It was an early flight to New York, and I was exhausted. Even during the safety briefing, I mostly tuned out, alternately dozing and looking out the window. I caught the Australian lilt in the voice of the attendant doing the safety briefing, but thought nothing of it. I wasn’t thinking of much of anything except the nap I was ready to take. By the time they started snack service, I was out.

I woke up a few minutes before they started serving lunch, feeling much refreshed. Even so, it took me a moment to process what, or rather whom, I was seeing. When I did, I smiled in delighted surprise.

She didn’t.

###

I froze like a rabbit. All my routine went right out the window, in the middle of handing someone their boxed lunch. She sat there beaming at me like I was her long lost best friend and all I could do was stare at her in terror.

We’d only met for about twenty minutes. Long enough to quietly compare notes and determine we were contemporaries in our real lives, and then to discover we had another friend in common--the Brigadier--as he also appeared with what we realized was another Doctor.

I’d actually thought about looking her up, after I’d stopped running as fast as I could from the Daleks and the Doctor and Turlough and people’s faces melting and all of it. After I’d caught my breath, I thought, “Who can I possibly talk to about this stuff? Who can help me get it out of my head? Wait! There’s that journalist! Sarah Jane Smith…”

But I never did it. Mind you, I never expected her to look for me, either. I wasn’t sour about it. She was the easy one to find--the one with the byline in the magazines. I was just a nobody from the outback who’d wanted to fly and wound up flying a lot further than she’d ever planned on.

Now, there she was, and I had no bloody idea what to do next.

And then she said my name, and I bolted back down the aisle and hid in the loo.

###

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. The other flight attendant who had been working the trolley looked at me with a puzzled, half-accusing look. All I could do is return the puzzlement and shrug.

But I couldn’t leave it like that. I excused myself, climbed over my seatmates (because modern air-travel is oh, so dignified!), and headed down the aisle in the direction of the loo.

Once I got there, I stopped a moment. The woman was definitely Tegan--she was unmistakable. She was also clearly startled--more than startled--by my not only being on one of her flights but recognizing her.

She might not welcome my chasing her down like this.

Still, I was here, now. I knocked, not too forcefully, I hoped, and said, just loud enough to be heard, “Tegan?”

###

Once I got to the lavatory, I knew I had at best about two minutes, maybe a lot less, before someone who had seen the way I’d bolted knocked to see if I was okay. Once I had the locked door behind me, I wasted no time applying every non-alcoholic trick I knew to try to wrestle myself out of my panic.

Whenever I start admonishing myself, somehow I always hear it my Auntie Vanessa’s voice. It’s silly, really--her death was part of what started all this. She’d never known the Doctor, or the Master, or Nyssa--she’d have liked Nyssa; Adric probably would have annoyed her but she’d have liked Nyssa--or anything about that life.

But it was still somehow her voice that I heard when I looked in the mirror and told myself, “Come on, now, girl, Pull yourself together. You faced down the Mara, twice, and lived to remember it. Here at last is someone you might actually be able to talk to about it all, and you’re making a fool out of yourself in front of your passengers and all.”

My timing was about right. About two minutes later came the knock; but the concerned voice calling my name was not the one I was expecting.

I resisted the urge to lash out and tell her to go away. She was concerned, and confused. At that moment, a new thought occurred to me. She was one of only two former companions of the Doctor I’d ever met by name--the Brigadier being the other--and the only one I’d seen since I left the Doctor, myself. I’d been assuming that we all wind up like this--a panic-prone, paranoid mess with nightmares of melting faces.

But Sarah Jane Smith sounded puzzled at my reaction. What if she didn’t have those kinds of nightmares at all? Or at least had figured out how to cope with them?

Suddenly, I realized, I really needed to talk to her.

With a deep breath, I said, “Give me a second”, and put myself back together so I didn’t look a total wreck in front of the whole plane.

###

She came out tentatively, almost shyly. “Sorry about that. I was a bit startled.”

“Are you all right?”

Tegan looked me straight in the eye and said, “Not entirely, but it’s not really your fault. Actually, I’d really like to talk to you. I’m going to be in New York overnight once we land…”

“I’m there for a few days, chasing down a story. Dinner tonight?”

She nodded, and even smiled a bit. “That sounds good. The restaurant in the hotel where they put us up, near the airport, isn’t too bad. Assuming we’re on time, would 7 work?”

I smiled back. “Sounds fine. I’ll go back and be a proper little passenger and we’ll talk again then.”

“Good”, she replied. “And...thanks.”

###

I managed the rest of the flight without disgracing myself. The other attendants all talked to me about it at one point or another, but thankfully accepted my answer that I was simply startled and over-reacted. Most of them were people I’d worked with before, and considered friends,  and they didn’t let me down by pushing me too hard on the subject. Everyone has bad days in this job, after all.

I could tell, though, that a couple wanted to pry for more information. I think they thought Sarah Jane might be an ex of mine or something. That would have been some nice, juicy gossip for them, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it making the rounds eventually, but really, to the degree I let anyone near me at all, I prefer Bruce to Sheila any day.

Of course, I probably didn’t help those rumours by slipping her the hotel information on her way off the plane…

Nothing for it now, though, except to go ahead with the meeting and let people think what they will.

###

We landed early in the afternoon, so while it seemed a little silly to go to Manhattan only to come back to Queens later, I had plenty of time and no real excuse to hang about in Queens. So over to my own hotel I went, showered, collapsed for a few hours, and changed. I fretted a bit about timing--getting about in New York always seems to take longer than it should--but finally decided early was better than late and had the bell captain hail a cab for me.

My instincts were good--traffic backed us up for quite a while. I got to Tegan’s hotel just about on time.

###

I already had a table, and was trying not to look too nervous. Honestly, I wasn’t doing my reputation any favours. My fellow flight attendants were off at another table and here I was fidgeting like I was expecting a date.

She walked in right on time. _Trust a fellow time traveler to arrive on time!_ I giggled, a bit hysterically, at the thought. Maybe I really was losing it.

If nothing else, it meant I could easily muster a smile this time and not run for the nearest exit. I rose, we shook hands like we did the first time we met, and she sat down. We ordered cocktails, puttered with our menus while sipping them, ordered food…

And then the booze hit just enough that I could start to talk…

###

What I remember most about the conversation was how abruptly it dove deep. I’m sure we started out with some kind of small talk, but my memory is that we went pretty much from ordering food to...well, I guess “venting” is the modern word for it.

My time with the Doctor was something I remember primarily with wonder and longing. It never occurred to me--literally never--that others might be more inclined to remember the bad than the good. I saw my share of horrors, mind you, but they never overcame the wonder.

Clearly, that wasn’t the case for Tegan.

###

Sarah Jane Smith listened to me rant for at least two hours. I don’t remember breathing. I barely ate my dinner. Once I started talking, I just couldn’t stop.

Well, let’s be honest. There’s nothing new about that.

I can only assume that her journalistic training helped her sit through it all without once looking bored, or horrified, or anything other than genuinely interested. I could see her mentally comparing experiences, but she never interrupted. She just kept on listening, doing all the right things to keep me going if I stalled.

And then...I finally ran out of steam. If you’d asked me ahead of time, “How long do you think it would take to get all of what’s been bothering you since you left the Doctor off your chest?” I’d have said weeks. But apparently, two hours of solid talking to someone who knew what I was talking about was enough.

Even so, when I realized just how long had gone by, I found myself a little sheepish. And then I started laughing.

I don’t think I stopped for five minutes.

###

Two hours of listening to poor Tegan tell me about everything that kept her awake at night--especially the gruesome details of her last encounter with the Daleks--had me starting to wrack my memory for whether UNIT had a therapist anywhere in their medical staff. Tegan needed more help than I could give her, but I was prepared to give her all the help I could.

And then, she started laughing. Not crazy, hysterical laughter. Just the kind of almost embarrassed laughter that comes up when you realize you haven’t given the other person a chance to get a word in edgewise and your dinner is cold.

I could also tell it was the first real laugh she’d enjoyed, hysterical or otherwise, in a long time.

When it finally wound down, I smiled and asked the only thing one can ask at that moment. “Feeling any better?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, at first without thought. Then she took a moment, and really thought about it, and more quietly repeated. “Yes. Thank you. I have no idea what that was like to hear, but… yes.”

“You’re quite welcome. You clearly needed it.”

“There really ought to be a support group or something.”

“Time Travellers Anonymous?”

Tegan giggled. “Hello, my name is Tegan Jovanka, and I’ve managed to avoid meeting my own grandmother for three weeks.”

That set us both off. Heaven only knows what the other flight attendants from our plane must have thought about us, let alone the other patrons.

She sobered a bit as the laugh wound down. Then she said, “I envy you.”

“Why?”

“You don’t have these problems, do you?”

This was a moment that needed honesty, which meant also being fully honest with myself. “Sometimes. Sometimes I remember being a slave for the Thals and almost dying of radiation poisoning; or watching a man named Noah get eaten from the inside by a giant wasp larva… things like that. Some nights, yeah, I wake up screaming.”

“But you’d go back in a heartbeat, if you could, wouldn’t you?” It was...not really an accusation. Not really a question, either.

“Maybe. Part of me wants to. Part of me thinks that humans age too fast. It’s been 15 years for me, and my knees aren’t what they used to be...”

“...and being with him always means an awful lot of running!” we somehow finished in unison, leading to more chuckles.

“Thing is,” I continued, “I think we came at it differently to start with. I was already investigating weird, dangerous things--Mulder and Scully stuff, my aunt Lavinia likes to say--when I met the Doctor, and that’s still more or less what I do. First number I programmed in the minute I got a mobile phone was a UNIT tip line so I could let them know when something that looked bigger than just a story came along. Being with the Doctor made it weirder, more dangerous, sometimes more outright terrifying, but it was still what I wanted to be doing.”

Tegan nodded, thoughtfully. “I kind of fell into it by accident. Flying was adventure enough for me. But...I did go back to them. I just realized, I don’t think you knew...I actually left twice. Once, I thought I’d just go back to my job, because we arrived not long after I’d first left with them. But it had been long enough. I hadn’t turned up, they couldn’t reach me, and I couldn’t give them a good excuse, so they sacked me. Then my cousin got tangled up in something...well, Doctorish, and I took the opportunity to go back because I didn’t have anything else to do. The first time, I thought I was leaving for something; the second time, honestly, I just ran away.”

“See,” I responded, “This is where I envy you. You chose. You chose to leave, to go back, and to leave again. You may not have had much choice at the start, but I didn’t get a choice at the end. I,” and I couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of my voice, “got left.”

“What?!”

“The rules must have changed by the time you and I met there, or maybe it’s because we were all abducted, so it wasn’t our fault, but at the time, aliens weren’t permitted on Gallifrey, and he had to go home--absolutely had to, he said. The funny thing is that I’d just left the control room in a snit and was pulling an ‘I’m going home to my mother’ routine, which I realize now was really absurd under any circumstances, but he’d never noticed. He’d already been distracted and by the time I got back to the console room, my bags already packed, he asked me how I knew...and of course I didn’t. It was just a silly coincidence. But he left me off, thinking it was home--Croydon.”

Before I could say it, she did, her glass raised in a toast. “It wasn’t, of course.”

What could I do but laugh and clink glasses. “Aberdeen.”

And thus, once again, we scandalized the restaurant with our laughter.

###

It was my turn to listen, and I was grateful for it. I ate some of my cold dinner while we sipped at cocktails and she shared some of her perspective.

“Thing is,” Sarah Jane said after the latest round of laughter, “I honestly thought he must be dead. That something really dire must have happened to him. The only hint I had that he might not be was that I found a gift he’d left me--only he’d sent it to my aunt’s place and I didn’t even find it ‘til I was looking for something in her attic. A robot dog of all things.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Mmhm! It, well, he, K9, told me he was the third model and that the Doctor had built him specifically for me. But I still don’t know when…”

“So...wait...let’s see if we can put this in order somehow. You showed up in that tower with the really tall one…”

“That’s right. But I actually had known two of him. I watched him regenerate into...well, teeth and curls, who wasn’t there on Gallifrey that time…”

Tegan nodded. “And I showed up with the one who told us--before we made it to the tower--that he was the original, but I was actually traveling with the blond one at the time...and when I started, I think it was with the same one you call ‘teeth and curls’. Absurd scarf, thousand yard stare…”

Sarah Jane was nodding vigorously, almost spilling her drink. “That was him.”

“Well, then, I don’t know if it really makes you feel any better, but the blond one definitely came later.”

She stewed on that for a moment. “It should make me feel at least a little better, but I’m not sure it does right now. I...it’s good to have some idea he’s still alive. But...oh, this is selfish, isn’t it?”

“No worse than me suddenly feeling like I was the other woman…”

That got her laughing again.

Through gasps in her laughter, she said, “In that case, we’re both the other women. We know he only has one true love…,” and she raised her glass.

Together, we clinked and said, “The TARDIS!”

###

By then, it was getting late. I still had to get back to Manhattan, she had to fly in the morning. We talked about smaller, easier things--we’d gotten most of the difficult ones out of our systems, but late as it was, it still felt like we needed to wind down, rather than just stop, so we did. And then, we hugged--I was a bit surprised by it but it seemed right--and she went upstairs and I caught a cab out front.

We never actually made an explicit pact of it, but after that, I always made a point of e-mailing her when I was going to be flying somewhere on her airline soon, and she always told me which flights she’d be on. We never met in London. Meeting together in contemporary London, would simply have been too...mundane...for our two-person support group. Instead, it was cocktails in Chicago; breakfast in Hong Kong; dinner in Rome.

Her co-workers were sure something was going on that wasn’t. We didn’t really care, and let them gossip.

Over the years, I managed to find others whose lives the Doctor touched. Some of them I spoke to; some I just sort of kept tabs on. We never did actually bring them all together for a Time Travelers Anonymous meeting, although I did share the joke with a couple of them. Polly seemed particularly amused, although her husband Ben seemed less taken with it. He apologized later though. “Sorry...it is funny, but it also...well, it’s kinda true, isn’t it. We get addicted to it, and then we leave it--or are left behind--and it’s gone. And then what? So we make our own adventures, and get into our own kinds of trouble.”

I couldn’t argue with him.

###

The last time I saw Sarah Jane Smith was in late 2013, in San Francisco. She’d been traveling less, and getting into more trouble back home, but we’d stayed in touch anyway.

She seemed very far away as we got together for breakfast in a cafe at Bush and Grant, and told me quietly, in a voice more frightened than any I’d ever heard from her, that she had terminal cancer.

For the first time since that day I’d run for the loo when she recognized me, I didn’t know what to say to her. So I said that.

“I know. Nobody does. I don’t. I spent my whole life working with words and now...I’ve got none left. At least, not for this.”

“Then let’s talk about something else.”

So we did--the news, our travels, her adopted son and some of their adventures. It was a little brittle, but it was what she needed, and Lord knows I owed her that.

We hugged again as we parted, and she said, trying to stay cheerful, “Hey. Just another adventure, right?”

I smiled back, “I hope so!”

And that’s how I choose to remember her. Smiling and looking for adventures. She gave that back to me, although I never was as adventurous as her. After she was gone, I went out and met some of those other people she’d told me about--the ones she’d actually met, anyway. Jo Grant--antique Jo Grant, tiny and absurd and brilliant and flighty Jo Grant--was a particular hoot.

“We go on making our own adventures!” she said, even though she was old enough that most people would consider being able to walk an adventure.

I couldn’t argue with her.  


**Author's Note:**

> Continuity notes: This is mostly set in the mid-1990s, about 20 years before SJS meets Ten. Tegan and Sarah Jane met briefly in the Death Zone on Gallifrey in The Five Doctors. “School Reunion” leaves it ambiguous as to whether SJS actually remembers that, but I’ve chosen to assume she, and Tegan, do. How Sarah Jane got a K9 comes from the first attempt at an SJS series, “K9 and Company”, which flopped hard. The idea that Sarah Jane has met or at least knows about other former companions comes from The Sarah Jane Adventures: "Death of the Doctor”.  Elisabeth Sladen, the actress who played SJS, died in 2011 of cancer. The character’s fate has never been canonically revealed, and if it ever is, I defer to it, but in the meantime, this seemed...fitting. The cafe at Bush and Grant in San Francisco is Cafe de la Presse and has tasty pastries for breakfast.


End file.
